"Jerrold Levinson and Hans Maes have been in the very centre of the discussion, holding opposite views on whether pornography can be art. In the introduction they point out that pornography's bad reputation is largely responsible for the lack of interest aestheticians showed it in the past. It seems that even if there are some pornographic works which are aesthetically rewarding, and there is some art that flirts with porn, they are very rare. Philosophers of art only recently started asking why the overlap is so small, but once the discussion started it seemed to grow in popularity every day, and it`s good to see some of its main topics explored more in depth in a book"[1] --Simon Fokt

When Sontag wrote those words, the notion of the respectability of erotic literature was beginning to be established, but the notion of pornographic literature being just as respectable was new. The use of the word pornography coupled with positive attributes was unheard of.

"We had occasion, in fact, to watch the transformation of pornography into art before our own eyes when Hans Bellmer one day worked in our presence, making a complicated and highly erotic engraving from a series of common pornographic photographs."